Bela Fleck, banjoist extraordinaire, has been nominated for over 20 Grammys, in more different categories than any other artist. His most recent awards came last week, his 12th and 13th. Throw Down Your Heart: Tales From The Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3 — Africa Sessions was named best contemporary world music album. Fleck also took best pop instrumental performance for the album track “Throw Down Your Heart.”
The banjo is most closely associated with Appalachian music, especially bluegrass. Its tough steel strings, plucked by finger picks, resonate against a round cured hide surface pulled taut across a shallow steel pan. The resulting buzzy twang, coupled with swift cascading chords from the fretted neck, means backwoods foot stomping, simple Scotch-Irish music to most of us.
Bela didn’t see it that way. Raised among classical musicians (Bela is for Bartok, his middle name Anton is for Dvorak), he was turned on to the banjo when his grandfather got him one at age 14; he’d been whining about it for ten years, after watching The Beverly Hillbillies. Although he went to New York’s High School of Music and Art, he had to get outside lessons, since banjo wasn’t on the curriculum. Maybe because he grew up in The City, he didn’t see the banjo as a niche instrument.
He sucked up influences beyond Flatt and Scruggs, adding bebop and contemporary jazz, classical, and World Music to his banjo’s repertoire. His career has been one of ceaseless collaboration with musicians. Jazz pianist Chick Corea, classical bassist Edgar Meyer, rock hero Dave Matthews, and chinese folklorist Abigail Washburn are among his partners just in the last ten years.
In 2005, he toured Africa, specifically Tanzania, Uganda, Mali, and Ghana. He had learned that the banjo, although invented by the descendent of the Scotch and Irish immigrant to the US Appalachians, actually had its roots in instruments brought from Africa by slave in the 17th and 18 centuries. While on tour, he documented his jam sessions with some of the best traditional musicians he found, released as a film in 08. He also put out the CD Throw Down Your Heart with them, and brought some over to tour the US this year.
The Wheeler Opera House in Aspen was built with money from the silver boom of 1879-93. By law, no building in Aspen may be higher than the Opera House, or the Hotel Jerome, both 3 story sandstone edifices from that Victorian era. In the middle of the 20th century, it was converted to a movie theatre, then renovated for its 100th anniversary in the early 80s. Seating several hundred in widely spaced seats on the main floor, with more congenial seating in a balcony, the Aspen community has invested its considerable resources insuring a plush and intimate environment for audience and performer alike.
I’ve now seen Fleck there twice. He is a sly engaging performer, with none of the overt jouncy physical style of down home bluegrass. Whenever he flays his left hand at lightening speed up and down his banjo’s neck, he’ll close his eyes and twitch his mouth and lower cheeks, the only sign of how difficult it is for him to pull off the feats he attempts.
He clearly refuses to let the instrument dictate the music he plays. He is alone in expanding the envelope of the possible for the humble banjo. Like Andres Segovia with the guitar, he has made it his personal crusade to demonstrate that the banjo can be used as a serious instrument as well as being a source of the simpler good feelings bluegrass can bring.
I am most reminded of Pablo Picasso’s career arc. His very early works – done while he was still a teen – show a subtle realism every bit as inspiring as Rembrandt. But, as if he realised he did not want to repeat the same works over and over, he started looking for and even creating new modes of expressing high emotion and beauty through painting. So too Bela Fleck has gone far beyond classic bluegrass to raise his banjo playing to virtuosity in any musical style he chooses.
The Africa Project brings two East Africans and a Malian group together, with Bela in the center, supporting and soloing in a unique blend of sounds. The Tanzanians are John Kitame and Anania Ngoliga. Kitame, short, lean, and blind, plays the “thumb piano”. This is looks like a crude home made device, sort of a cross between a Jew’s Harp and a steel drum band. A small wooden box, held in the lap, serves as the sounding board. Thin steel rods of various lengths and curvatures are wedged under a single cross piece, and plucked with the thumbs. The sound is eerily Carib, like several steel drums in harmony. Kitame, smiling with head tilted back and wearing large dark glasses, sings while Ngoliga provides harmony vocals and softly strums a standard guitar.
The Malian band N’goni Ba is led by Bassekouye Kouyate, master of the N’goni looks like some sort of backyard collection of found items and toy instruments. The drummer pounds a hemisphere which looks like half a Swedish exercise ball. Next to him, a joyous high-kicking percussionist wields a gourd, seeds rattling inside, covered by a netting of small shells. He also wears under his arm as if in a shoulder holster a small single drum like a bongo, which he slaps with his hand or a curved sharp stick. Kouyate’s wife serves as vocalist, with chants, hums, and soaring sounds as wild as Aretha Franklin.
Three remaining members of the band, as well as Kouyate, play the N’Goni, a lute like affair with 3 or 4 strings (sometimes up to seven). They come in various sizes, including a bass, and consist of a dried gourd cut in half lengthwise, with cured rawhide stretched tight across and secure with dowels, a bridge to supports the strings, and a rounded stick serving as the neck. The band has jury-rigged electric pickups to the sides, held on with duct tape.
These guys can rock, seriously rock. The leader, Kouyate, smiles and nods with the rhythms, and employs a wah wah pedal in the best Jimi Hendrix mode. Bela leans in and trades licks with him, in one of the odder musical pairings imaginable.
Things are coming full circle, it seems, as the n’goni is reputed to be the inspiration for the original banjos. Kouyate and Bela share a deep respect for each other’s playing, and bond easily across both space and time.
The Africa Project is on tour in small towns and college venues this winter and spring. Here is a YouTube of N’Goni Ba at Albert Hall with a guest guitarist.